source: NACLA
In December 2025, nearly one month after the initial vote, Honduras finally declared Nasry Asfura its new president. The right-wing candidate, backed by U.S. President Donald Trump, came to power promising to reverse the policies of his left-wing predecessor, Xiomara Castro. Indigenous communities like the Maya Chorti in the department of Copán immediately felt the changes. Long a force of resistance against state-backed extractivism, the Chorti people were quick to sound alarms about the defunding of their programs and the targeting of their communities, policies they link to their own histories of resistance.
Traditionally, successive National Party (Partido Nacional, PN) administrations have held close alliances with transnational corporations who have enabled development and privatization projects, often at the expense of Indigenous autonomy. For Maya Chorti communities, these dynamics have already begun to take shape through the dismantling of bilingual education programs and the undermining of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). This is not an isolated policy change, but instead a marker of a broader political transition that has consistently unsettled the conditions under which the Maya Chorti defend their land, language, and collective agency.
Privatization and Human Rights Abuses
Historically, the PN, of which Asfura is a member, has been a favorite of the United States. In 2009, democratically elected center-left President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a military coup that was supported by the United States under the Obama Administration, after which the PN’s Roberto Micheletti was installed as interim president. Backed by the United States, the PN had control of Honduras from 2009-2020. The rise of Xiomara Castro—the wife of former President Zelaya—to power marked a break with this right-wing rule, ushering in a government with closer ties to Maya Chorti and campesino movements. Progressive governance in Honduras, however, has been short-lived, as the PN is now back in power after winning an election in which the Trump administration intervened directly by threatening aid cuts if Asfura lost and pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker and a PN affiliated president.
During its time in power, the PN has advanced a steady agenda of privatization, the consequences of which have fallen disproportionately on the country’s marginalized communities.
During its time in power, the PN has advanced a steady agenda of privatization, the consequences of which have fallen disproportionately on the country’s marginalized communities. PN governments have pushed for the construction of ZEDES—privatized cities that allow for independent corporate governance—overseen the mass expansion of agribusiness and the dispossession of small landowners from their land, and privatized key public sectors including electricity, water, telecommunications, and healthcare.
These economic reforms have coincided with the strengthening of state security forces, including the National Police, which have become central to managing resistance in these projects. The expansion of security forces under privatization has also been accompanied by a longer history of PN administrations appointing figures linked to human rights abuses into institutions tasked with public security. Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the PN’s President from 2010-2014, appointed Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla as Director General of National Police, despite his alleged ties to death squads and long history of human rights violations. Though he was eventually dismissed in 2013, and extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges, he was but one of several key figures whose ties to organized crime and repressive policies were combined to repress campesino and Indigenous communities whose resistance to land privatization and extractive development had to be squashed.
This pattern of violence and impunity has continued under the new Asfura government. Two months after assuming office, homicides have increased 5.65 percent under his leadership, as have the number of disappeared persons. The promotion of security officials previously accused of crimes, too, has continued.
Cutting Indigenous Programs
In a 2007 census, it was estimated that 10,600 Maya Chorti lived in Honduras. Chorti communities are primarily located in the Western department of Copán, and it is in these mainly Maya Chorti towns where a bilingual Chorti teacher is appointed to help preserve the Chorti language.
In Copán, the return of the PN has already been felt by Indigenous Maya Chorti communities, whose cultural and linguistic representation in local schools and villages has decreased amidst targeted budget cuts. This has been achieved by some political actors casting movements like the CONICHH (National Indigenous Council of the Maya Chorti of Honduras), the country’s only federally recognized Maya Chorti organization, as partisan organizations. Though this accusation is rejected by Santiago Ohajaca, its elected leader, the new right-wing administration has successfully begun removing Maya Chorti educational and cultural programs and replacing it with general education courses in Spanish taught by staff with ties to the PN.
Cutting funding for such educational initiatives would be unprecedented, and would disrupt promises and agreements between the CONICHH and the Honduran Ministry of Education that have been implemented throughout different governments. These agreements have consisted of providing local schools and communities in the Department of Copán with bilingual educators who can teach the Maya Chorti language, teacher training for these educators, and Chorti curriculum development in schools. Ohajaca stated that CONICHH has Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) representatives to provide oversight and verify that the Intercultural Education Office and the Departmental Directorate are providing authentic representations of Maya Chorti language and culture in schools and communities.
Ohajaca also noted that these agreements between the Ministry of Education and CONICHH have been upheld for over thirty years and are protected under ILO Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Despite these protections, Ohajaca highlights that the problem stems from a paralleled coordination structure that replaces Indigenous teachers with general-education staff loyal to the Partido Nacional—a political manipulation with deep historical and political stakes against Indigenous rights defenders.
“While some see this as merely a matter of budgets, for us it is about implementing Maya language and culture in schools, ensuring our communities’ education reflects our heritage, something they fail to understand,” said Ohajaca “Their goal is to eliminate the gains we’ve already established and undermine the leadership we’ve built.”
Accusations that Indigenous Organizations are partisan are not new in Honduras, they often function as a political rationale to justify the shifts in policy and the restructuring of state programs that originally provided direct aid to Indigenous communities.
According to local Copán news outlet Corporación Maya Visión (Maya Vision Corporation), newly elected officials in multiple municipal education offices in the department of Copán and parallel authorities have stated that there are no budgetary structures in place to continue supporting agreements with CONICHH, instead opting to assign non-bilingual teachers to bilingual and Indigenous schools. From the Maya Chorti perspective, this means the possible removal of a pedagogical-curricular project, which is a meaningful cultural and educational initiative to aid in the protection and preservation of the Maya Chorti culture and language for future generations.
A Dangerous Place for Activism
Beyond simply attacking their initiatives, authorities in the territory are “harassing and discriminating against the institution that represents the interests of the Chorti population,” said Ohajaca. “There have even been death threats against community leaders because of the stakes involved,” he added. These threats against the Maya Chorti community are grave examples of intimidation that must be taken seriously given that Honduras has been repeatedly identified by human rights groups such as Amnesty International as one of the most dangerous places on earth for Indigenous rights activists and land defenders.
In recent years, there have been multiple documented disappearances and killings of community leaders defending Indigenous ways of life and territory.
In recent years, there have been multiple documented disappearances and killings of community leaders defending Indigenous ways of life and territory. This includes the founder of CONICHH, Candido Amador Recinos, who was murdered in Copán in 1997 while protesting U.S.-backed agrarian reform initiatives that privatized communally-owned Chorti lands. Amador Recinos, a member of the Chorti community from the aldea of Los Corrales near Copán Ruinas, co-founded CONICHH in the mid-1990s after being mentored by Berta Caceres, an environmental activist and Indigenous leader who was killed in 2016. At the time, the Maya Chorti were not recognized by the Honduran state as an Indigenous group and thus received no government recognition, funding, or communal lands. Across the fertile Copán valley, large swaths of their territory were occupied by well-connected landowners who, in partnership with agribusiness, fish hatcheries, and tourism investors, launched profitable industries that displaced local communities.
Indigenous and campesino resistance, led by organizations like CONICHH, represent a direct threat to the profitability of these industries. But the struggle is not only about gaining access to land, it is also about confronting the environmental destruction that accompanies these projects. Protecting the Mayan Ruins and the valley that surrounds it from further anthropological extraction, tourist development, and keeping the land itself safe will sustain their livelihoods. In this sense, Indigenous and campesino demands for land are inseparable from demands for cultural and environmental survival.
Activists who voice community demands often become targets of intimidation or lethal violence, as was the case of Candido, whose killing in 1997, was one of the first major assassinations of Honduran land defenders. Candido’s murderers were never caught, though many Copanecos have said they know the murderers were among the land-owning elite who didn’t want to lose their properties. However, they haven’t come forward with their suspicions because they fear for their lives.
As they do every year, on April 12, the 29th anniversary of his assassination, members of the Maya Chorti community gathered at his tomb to remember him, sing corridos in his honor, and demand justice for his murder.
To Santiago, threats against community activists remain a prominent feature of life in Copán today. “Many Maya Chorti no longer feel safe, even in their own territories,” he said. The cuts to education initiatives, a newer front in the war against the Maya Chorti’s autonomy and cultural survival, is shaped by a larger history of struggle. Yet, the Maya Chorti will continue resisting political coercion to defend their language, land, and future.
